Teaching Activity. By Adam Sanchez. Rethinking Schools.
This lesson and accompanying article teach about the largest civil rights protest of the 1960s was in New York City, when hundreds of thousands of students stayed home to protest school segregation.
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Teaching Activity. By Gretchen Kraig-Turner. 2024. Rethinking Schools.
A high school science teacher revises her lesson on the USPHS Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee to center resistance.
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More than 450,000 New York City school children boycotted school as part of a protest for quality schools for Black and Latino students.
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Howard University students seized the Administration Building, demanding changes in the discipline policy, the addition of courses in African American history, and more.
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Teaching Activity. By Jesse Hagopian. 2025. 40 pages.
This lesson explores major examples of laws passed to suppress Black education in the wake of major victories for the Black Freedom Struggle, highlighting the historical context and motivations behind these legislative efforts.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Teri Kanefield. 2014. 56 pages.
Illustrated book of a teenager who led a student walk out to protest substandard conditions at a Virginia high school in 1951.
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The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Tinker v. Des Moines that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
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Book — Non-fiction. By Marjorie Murphy. 1992. 304 pages.
The history of unionization of teachers.
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Digital collection. Features 11 projects on labor and civil rights movements in the Pacific Northwest with oral histories, primary documents, and more.
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Article. By Bill Bigelow.
The story of how teachers, parents, and students in Portland, Oregon organized to demand that climate change be taught honestly and to pass a climate justice resolution.
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Film. Directed by Lucy Massie Phenix and Catherine Murphy. 2019. 9 minutes.
Documentary about Citizenship Schools.
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The first free school south of the Mason-Dixon Line was established in Parkersburg, West Virginia, during the Civil War.
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At this Teach Truth Prep Session, participants will hear from the growing chorus of diverse voices speaking out to defend students’ freedom to learn and educators’ freedom to teach.
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Book — Non-fiction. By Harry G. Lefever. 2005. 304 pages.
The story of Spelman College students and faculty engagement in the Civil Rights Movement from 1957 to 1967.
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Website.
Films, journal, and readings for teachers on education for equity.
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In disciplined groups and singing freedom songs, students “ditch” class to march for justice and fill the jails.
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Check out three stories about teachers who teach outside the textbook and organize to defend the right to teach people’s history.
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In an attempt to gain pay equity for Black teachers in Maryland, William B. Gibbs Jr. became the lead plaintiff in the NAACP’s case for pay equity in Montgomery County, a case known as Gibbs v. Broome.
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Explore the varied impact of the American Revolution on voices often stifled or erased from its commemorations in this workshop facilitated by Zinn Education Project program manager Mimi Eisen and Rethinking Schools editor Jesse Hagopian.
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Book — Non-fiction. Edited by George Theoharis and John Rogers. 2026. 304 pages.
A compilation of leading education scholars on reenvisioning and creating equitable, inclusive, and democratic public schools.
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Film. Directed by Catherine Murphy and Iris de Oliveira. 2025. 70 minutes.
Tells the story of an experimental adult education project in Northeastern Brazil led by Paulo Freire that enabled hundreds of rural people to read, write, and begin to vote.
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